New tom on the block

Today's been a funny sort of day. I had to drag myself out of bed very early to get Chris to the station. He'd bought a cheap advance ticket, but just before we left he noticed that he's inadvertantly booked it for the 15th March...so he had to get a new ticket at the station, at nearly seven times the cost of the advance one!

I always feel a bit empty after he leaves, so I spent a couple of hours mooching around, preparing for the science session we were hosting later in the morning. The science session was probably the high point of the day. We covered organic chemistry - not the easiest subject. But the boys enjoyed making structural models of alkanes, and we made some glue out of milk, to help with understanding polymerisation. I was amazed how effective this was: the finished produce looked remarkably like PVA and seems to stick things together even more effectively.

We finished our science in mid afternoon, and only then did I think about trying to get a possible blip. By then the weather was grey, wet and cold so I didn't really feel like going out to find the waxwings. I watched the bird feeder for a while, got some greenfinch shots and completely missed a spectacular magpie fight on the lawn (there's a lot of edginess among the magpies at the moment, with two pairs wanting to occupy our garden, and a number of extra hangers-on stirring up even more trouble).

As I was looking out of the window I saw one of our female cats galloping up the garden, followed by a new tom cat, first seen yesterday. He saw me watching him and stopped dead, staring boldly at me and standing his ground. He has rather beautiful eyes, but a strangely shaped mouth, giving him a sneering expression. I just hope he isn't going to be trouble!